Nvidia and SpaceX Just Joined a New AI Security Alliance. Here's What It Means for Both Stocks.

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) announced Monday that it has formed the Open Secure AI Alliance, along with a group of roughly three dozen tech companies. The alliance will build and share open tools for protecting software and AI agents -- AI programs that act on their own. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. was among the founding members through its AI unit, SpaceXAI.

What will the alliance do?

The alliance’s core mission will be to “work to remediate and disclose vulnerabilities using open technologies.” Members include Microsoft, IBM, Palantir Technologies, and CrowdStrike.

Nvidia said it is contributing open model weights -- the trained numbers inside a model, published for all to see and free to use -- along with training data and research. It also posted a project which Nvidia says makes an AI agent's conduct easier to govern, audit, trace, and test. SpaceXAI said future Grok models will ship with open weights.

Why now?

The timing follows a high-profile cyberattack in which an OpenAI model acting on its own -- no person was directing it -- hacked into the systems of Hugging Face, an open-source machine learning hub. Hugging Face said it contained the attack by running an open Chinese model on its own computers.

In Nvidia’s announcement of the alliance, the company stressed that "cyber defenders need open, frontier agentic systems for self-defense."

While the company didn’t name it directly, it’s clear that U.S. firms are wary of Chinese models -- many of which are open source -- becoming the go-to for cyber defense. But they are equally wary that the government will overstep and stifle competition domestically.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent floated sanctions last week for Chinese firms that use “distillation,” a process that creates new models from existing ones, more or less bypassing the incredibly expensive training phase that frontier models undergo.

More than 20 companies (including Nvidia) wrote to policymakers last week opposing "premature restrictions" on open weight models, saying it would “drive innovation overseas.“ SpaceX was not a signatory, but CEO Elon Musk took to X to share his support.

What it means for Nvidia investors

This is unlikely to make a big difference to Nvidia’s bottom line for now, but long-term, the alliance could help Nvidia increase its importance in AI security, a layer that could further expand its footprint.

In the short term, the company is doing just fine. It reported $81.6 billion in quarterly revenue in May, up an incredible 85% from a year earlier. It guided the current quarter to $91 billion.

What it means for SpaceX investors

Again, the impact on SpaceX in the short term is likely limited, but if the alliance is an indication of where the industry is headed -- moving from closed, proprietary models to open weight -- SpaceXAI could be in trouble.

Though it lags OpenAI and Anthropic, SpaceXAI is still first and foremost a frontier lab, and its business model relies on users paying for access. If cheaper -- or free -- models are available, it may prove difficult for the company to earn a return on the enormous costs involved in training Grok.

Johnny Rice has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends CrowdStrike, International Business Machines, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palantir Technologies. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.